[Cbe-oss-dev] Fwd: Problems building the ps3-linux branch

[Geoff Levand]

Aegis Lin wrote:
> On 3/16/07, Geoff Levand <geoffrey.levand at am.sony.com> wrote:
>>
>> > jmerino='/dev/sda1:/vmlinux-jmerino initrd=/dev/sda1:/initrd-
>> > jmerino.img root=/dev/sda2 init=/sbin/init 3'
>> >
>> > Then, the kernel starts up but when it is time to exec init, it says:
>> >
>> > Warning: Unable to open an initial console.
>>
>>
>> This is because YDL is setup for the 2.6.16 legacy kernel.
>>
>> In my testing I found that it is because for some reason (not dig yet) the
> current git kernel
> (2.6.21-rc1) for PS3 won't take command lines from kboot, so initrd will
> never have a chance
> to be loaded. I've verified this on FC5 and YDL5, for kboot (otheros.bld)
> provided by both
> Sony and YDL.

See the line LOAD_REG_IMMEDIATE(r3, dt_blob_start) here:

  http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/geoff/ps3-linux-patches.git;a=blob_plain;f=ps3-hacks/ps3-no-bootwrapper-hack.diff

> If the default kernel config is used, the kernel will be compiled with a
> default command
> line which only assigns "root" and "videomode". FC5 can still be booted
> normally because
> (root):/dev (the real directory, not the mounted tmpfs one) really contains
> the dev nodes
> needed during boot, while for YDL5, /dev is in fact empty. After booting,
> anyway udev will
> take control...

That makes sense.  I needed to add the nodes when I switched to FC6.  So
I guess the distro's initrd has those nodes?  I never checked into it.

-Geoff